Power of Communities

In a recent post on GigaOm Daniel Berninger discusses the decline of Yellow & White pages and how a possible internet replacement could be built for these legacy tools which could serve a plethora of communication channels we use today like Landline, Mobile, Messengers, Mails, Messages etc. One possible way he suggests is merging of Social networking models with the old phone directory paradigm. The challenge however is the lack of a purpose built social network.

This is one such real world valuable solution which could be possibly built on the social communications platform provided people could trust each other and the platform provider company with their personal data. You don’t see this as a big challenge in say a corporate intranet communications directory as you implicitly trust all the folks and there are corporate rules governing the data usage. So what can be done?

• Firstly create a platform where personal data is secure and is shared only after proper approvals. 
• Then focus on creating real world communities online as opposed to loosely coupled interest groups. The group should follow all real world rules of moderation and data sanity.

This will make people comfortable in storing and sharing information. Then this composite communications directory application could be possibly realized.

I have installed widget from Digg Labs which looks beneath the surface of the Digg community’s activities. It gets upcoming stories appear at the top when people digg them and bigger stories have more diggs. The digg count is listed in red. If you want to have this tool, go to Digg Labs.This has created a news flow for me that I can click and go to when I get interested. Ofcourse, one can control as to when it will appear on your desktop, which takes care of distraction.

This takes me to the point that Rafat Ali, Publisher of contentSutra.com a news site covering Indian digital content market, has written about the future of news being whatever you want it to be in Mint.

Rafat says that it’s not a glib answer. “For the last century, whatever the news media’s output was, it was deemed to be news. But now, especially in the last three-four years, people define how and what they want to consume, and what they consider news. They are increasingly defining whats interesting to them, and whats important for them.The news for an individual is coalescing around his or her interest areas, be it topic-based, social network-based, or local area-based. In other words, things that directly affect them on a day-to-day basis.

This correlates to my previous posting of the collective will now control the message. Will the generation that is born and brought up on high media “diet” be reading newspapers or will they get the news that they want and when they want.

Rafat does say that everyone is still getting exposed to the broader definition of news: things that are happening around the world in wars, politics and other areas. “The delivery of news is now defined by convenience, not by the container it comes in. That means tools such as RSS, widgets and SMS delivery are not containers, but just some of the many ways we define what we like and how we like to get it.” he says.

For us news is not something that will have to wait for the morning newspapers to come or to watch the TV news in the night. “News consumption will increasingly be a part of the daily activity of work, leisure and family time, without discrete time attached to it. News will come in as we carry on with our daily lives, not because we go hunting for it,” Rafat says.

Injoos has been looking at the pain that users go through to get the news or information that’s most relevant to them. We feel the future of information access and delivery will give way to groups of individuals with tools and business that will be built and leveraged. These groups will drive and fulfill their requirements. As per Rafat the future of news media companies may be in trouble, but not news itself. Declining newspaper revenues and the decline of local TV stations”at least in the US are pointers to it.

This will enable a new generation of entrepreneurs, with their unique business outlook and their solutions to come to the center stage. As for India, It’s not as to whether it will happen. It’s a question of when.

Tags: News, Information, relevant, community, groups

There has been an interesting development in media w.r.t Indian cricket. The ICL cup that’s being played in different cities in India has been out of coverage from one of the major newspapers with circulation of more than million copies. Come to think of it, cricket, which is like religion in India and which raises a lot of passion and opinions, is not covered. Compare to the coverage that IPL is getting. Readers are being left out of whatever the reason that the newspaper understands. Do we have a choice to change the perspective of this newspaper. Yes. We want. Can we, I doubt we can do it.

Compare this to the most widely visited news site in India. It has two sections, side by side, for ICL and IPL.  It has user comments and opinions, treating both with almost equal space.

Chris Anderson, Editor-In-Chief of Wired Magazine in his bestseller “The Longtail” writes “indeed, it’s quite extraordinary how much we’ve been able to increase our consumption bandwidth of information, scanning pages of Google search results and custom blog feeds. I may not read any more words than I once did but they are more likely to be meaningful to me, thanks to much better filters, better at suiting my own interests than say the editors of any newspaper, preselecting what I read. So because the words are more relevant, my meaningful bandwidth has increased; I have, in a sense, compressed my reading attention.”

Welcome to the era of User Generated Content or UGC. This is the time when users have become generators of content for the web, all thanks to technology. Internet has come to be considered as a free medium. It has come a long way and simplicity of tools, products and services that are being rolled out in all spheres for internet has played a useful role in content generation, in-turn influencing it’s growth. Having been associated with media houses, it feels good to see the plethora of views and opinions that are influencing the way society in general is evolving, especially businesses and companies, which are taking the internet and it’s strength seriously. Though, adoption of internet has not been at a desirable pace in India, the immense opportunities that are ahead should get one to sit up and think.

It is this adoption of the internet in India and the opportunities that it provides for users to communicate to individuals and groups by generating content that will have greatly influence the way society will get structured in the future. It is this Collective of people that is controlling the message. Look around and one can see how various forms of media has influenced through history. The information flow due to internet accompanied with individual expression will see desirable changes in the society. Organisations that are poised to see the emerging trend and create compelling value to the people will be leading the change. These are the one’s that will create wealth. Are there Organisations like that in India today who have been able to do it ? Let us know what you think?

In a recent interview with BBC News Tim Berners Lee who is considered as the father of internet answered a question, Are you too old for things like MySpace and Facebook?. For which he responded that “I’ve seen no evidence - either from my point of view or anybody else - that social networking and generally using the net to interact with other people is something that’s restricted to young people. In fact it’s very popular with older people. Young people can get on their bikes and visit each other, older people can’t. It may turn out to be more important for seniors than for young people.” I agree with Mr. Berners Lee and feel that the value of online social networking tools to a productive adult is immense, whether it is getting ahead in his career, keeping his hobbies alive and kicking, touch base with his school or college mates, Increasing participation in real world social communities etc.. In a broad sense being more productive in what he or she is doing today and achieve goals. But all the sites which exist today have been designed keeping mostly the entertainment value in mind with notable exceptions like Linked-in. Also the real world communities which a productive adult participates in, is either not online or are fragmented across various sites or applications spread on the internet. Then there is a clear lack of seamless experience for the user. It is quite a challenging task to keep up with the flood of information and trying to find the relevant one.  The idea of getting the most relevant information pushed to me when I need it would be the holy grail. All this will require first to create a solution which looks at a person’s real world identities and then give him/her the tools to manage those.

Mint carried this article on March 13 by Ramesh Ramanathan, co-founder of Janaagraha.

He takes note of the lack of urban rootedness, of identity as an urban citizen, and while the article is mainly about the second-class state of the urban citizen, the words on decreasing identity also hold importance.

To quote, “none of us can individually survive in the city without the coping mechanisms that our particular position offers us - our networks, our identities. Strip away these identities and the hollow shell of citizenry provides cold comfort…as the rules of engagement become increasingly transactional, we are seeing the strip mining of the urban identity - alienation as the underbelly of urban living.”

Our urban engagement with others is increasingly transactional and need-based, with increased time pressures and demands of the urban lifestyle. The need for the individual to connect to others, to identify with other people remains just as strong as ever, while urbanization destroys old identities and networks, disconnecting individuals.

Reconnection of such individuals is now seen on the new medium that bridges time and distance - the internet, and the rise and popularity of social networking mediums may be seen as an expression of the human need for identity. The mediums offers a multitude of ways to connect to and interact with others, and to discover connections along new paths of contact. Today, the nature of such online networking is still at an individual and transactional level, and must be further cemented by formation of communities and groups where individuals can reconnect to an identity, an identity that is shared and sustained by the group.